Unasked Questions at SFS-Q Deserve Answers Here at Home

Like Doha’s ever-expanding skyline, Georgetown’s growing campus in this tiny, wealthy oil state is still, literally and figuratively, under construction.

As enrollment at the School of Foreign Service’s Qatar campus doubled to more than 40 students this year (sophomores now have a rowdy class of freshmen to pick on), administrators began drafting plans to replace its current, freakishly modern quarters with a giant Georgetown-specific building. And the Washington campus continued to ship over top faculty and staff — people like SFS dean Brendan Hill.

Along with the four other American universities in Qatar, Georgetown has made a deep, ostensibly permanent, commitment to Qatar and the Middle East.

Yet the main campus community’s response to its Qatari counterpart has been tepid and uncritical.

I think SFS-Qatar is a good thing, an interesting and unprecedented experiment that deserves time to work itself out. And it’s full of good, caring administrators that want it to succeed. I love the place.

But it’s time we started thinking about the tough questions it raises.

***

How did Qatar convince Georgetown to set up a smaller version of itself nearly 7,000 miles away? Money talks. Georgetown gets paid to be there.

Working through something called the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, Qatar’s government is investing billions of dollars — yes, billions — in a place called Education City, the giant complex housing the emirate’s American universities.

In addition to covering the entire budget for Georgetown’s Qatar operations, the Qatar Foundation gave the main campus more than $1 million extra last year, a number expected to rise annually, and it’s paying to build Georgetown’s new Doha building.

SFS Dean Robert Gallucci told me last fall that the cash is compensation for the human cost the main campus incurs (losing top professors to Doha, and all the time D.C.-based administrators spend on the phone, for instance).

But it begs the question: Are we OK with being bribed? And if we are, are there better ways Georgetown could use its money in Qatar?

Disturbingly, the Qatar Foundation won’t release its annual budget, nor will it reveal the details of its agreements with American universities (neither will Georgetown).

But unlike the main campus, SFS-Qatar seems to have a lot of money. And it sometimes uses it in, well, interesting ways.

For instance, it recently spent thousands of dollars flying out some main campus students helping out with a Model United Nations conference to Doha. SFS-Q housed them in a five-star hotel and let them pig out on all the room service they wanted (in the interest of full disclosure, I was one of those students).

And the cost of the annual Model United Nations conference, for which SFS-Q is subsidizing the expenses of elite high schools throughout the Middle East?

Administrators declined to comment on the record, but a conference I attended last year included free hotel rooms and ornate dinners. Thousands and thousands of dollars.

***

Here are more questions: Is SFS-Q only a thin reflection of Georgetown? If so, can we fix that?

Although administrators are trying hard, students at SFS-Q have an extremely limited schedule of classes with little access to provocative electives taken for granted on the main campus.

And in a country where homosexuality is illegal, there is no Qatar version of GU Pride, nor is there likely ever to be. There is no Georgetown-Israel Alliance, no Corp, no Saxatones.

The Hoya barely ever shows up, and the SFS-Q newspaper, The DoHoya, has basically died.

Several students visited the main campus last year, but now SFS-Q has inexplicably slashed its budget to fly students to the mother campus.

In short, there are a lot of things missing from the Qatar experience. There always will be, and the students know it.

Many classes are the same as in Washington, but it’s not the same education, no matter what administrators say.

On a satellite campus thousands of miles away, however, there’s just no easy way to fix this.

There are other giant elephants administrators must see but haven’t publicly confronted.

SFS-Q is theoretically open to anyone, but in practice mostly elites make it to Education City, and about 10 percent of SFS-Q is made up of members of Qatar’s ruling family.

Yet most of Qatar is filled with desperately poor laborers who are often treated poorly and will never have the chance to go to college.

And while Qatar’s current emir has gradually liberalized the country’s laws, opened Qatar to investment and seems like a good guy, he took power in a coup and is far from a democrat. Amnesty International says 39 political prisoners remain jailed in the tiny emirate.

The country sponsors women’s conferences, but the constitution says women can’t accede to the throne.

Two final questions: Is Georgetown talking to Qatar about all this? Does it have a responsibility to do so?

***

SFS-Qatar is a grand experiment and nobody really knows where it is headed.

While there are many unanswered questions — some quite troubling — the campus also has great potential and we should be proud of it. We should want it to succeed. I know I do.

It could one day be our window to the real Middle East and Qatar’s window into American culture and thought.

Maybe it can even change attitudes there and simultaneously change the way we think.

The hard work Georgetown administrators have put into SFS-Q is impressive and the attitude of Doha’s Hoyas even more so. Despite all the challenges, they want to feel like they’re a part of Georgetown and they ought to feel that way.

But first, you have some questions to ask. And Georgetown has a duty to answer.

Moises D. Mendoza is a senior in the School of Foreign Service and is a former editor in chief of The Hoya. Days On The Hilltop will appear every Tuesday.